Viardot, who came with her husband, immediately conquered St. Petersburg; audiences “groaned with delight.” Turgenev, who had not been a major music lover before, began an adroit campaign on the famous singer. First he arranged to be in a hunting party outside the capital with Louis Viardot, who was as passionate about hunting as Turgenev; then he attended a performance of Rossini’s
Many years later, Pauline Viardot recalled her first meeting with Turgenev with a laugh: “He was introduced as a young Russian landowner, a good hunter, splendid raconteur, and bad poet.”8 Turgenev was enchanted by her, but no one could have predicted that their relationship would last for forty years.
Avdotya Panaeva (Nekrasov’s outspoken common-law wife) disapproved: “He shouted about his love for Viardot everywhere, and among friends he talked of nothing but Viardot.” Even the critic Belinsky, who liked the writer, once reprimanded Turgenev: “Really, how can one believe in a love as voluble as yours?”9
Gradually, everyone believed in it, and most importantly, so did Pauline and her husband. A strange menage a trois formed. Many assumed that it was purely platonic on Turgenev’s side, and that Louis Viardot had homoerotic feelings for the writer. The union turned out to be exceptionably stable, and wags hinted that it was fueled by Turgenev’s wealth (his mother died in 1850, leaving a large fortune) and fame.
Turgenev’s popularity increased rapidly. His
This union existed under the aegis of George Sand, who felt sincere amity for Turgenev, valuing him as a writer and human being: she thought him cheerful, simple, and modest (“He was extremely surprised when I told him he was a great artist and great poet”).
Leo Tolstoy’s opinion was rather different, as recorded in his diary in 1856: “His whole life is pretended simplicity.” Many other Russian observers described Turgenev as capricious, irresponsible, and vain. Foreigners, on the contrary, were all charmed by him: for them the gray-haired Russian giant was a fairy-tale character.
. . .
Turgenev wanted to live a life that was free, elegant, comfortable, and situated in the center of European culture. Before him, no Russian writer lived that way—nor has any since. Turgenev managed to achieve all this in no small part thanks to his relationship with the Viardots, whose salon was a magnet for French celebrities. One starstruck Russian woman described an evening she spent at the Viardots’, when the other guests included Gustave Flaubert, the violinist Pablo Sarasate, and the composers Charles Gounod and Camille Saint-Saens: “White lacquered furniture upholstered in pale silk left the center of the room open. To the left of the grand piano two steps led to the picture gallery, illuminated from above. There was an organ in there and a few, but very valuable, paintings … Mme Viardot came to the middle of the room … After the aria from Verdi’s opera, came Schubert’s ‘Erlkonig,’ accompanied by Saint-Saens.”10
Turgenev took great pleasure in the monthly “Flaubert dinners,” held in a private room of a Parisian restaurant for five famous writers: two close friends, Flaubert and Turgenev, and Zola, Alfonse Daudet, and Edmond Goncourt. Daudet recalled that they spoke of their own works and those of others (each time at least one of the participants brought along a just-published book), about women, and also about their ills, “the body that is becoming a burden like a ball and chain on a convict’s leg. Those were sad confessions of men who had turned forty!”11 Turgenev concentrated on the caviar, nevertheless.
The writers began their evenings at seven, and the feast would still be going strong at two a.m. The loud- spoken Flaubert would remove his jacket, the others following his lead; Turgenev, who suffered from gout, would lie down on the couch.
At those moments Turgenev undoubtedly imagined himself on the literary Olympus, one of the masters of the cultural universe. I saw similar emotions on the face of the poet Joseph Brodsky when he appeared in New York in the company of Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott (four Nobel laureates!).
Everything Turgenev wrote was instantly translated into several languages. For good reason—and like Brodsky a century later—Turgenev considered himself an arbiter and connoisseur of what contemporary Russian literature would please foreigners and what would not. He was a bit condescending about Tolstoy: “Foreigners don’t appreciate him.
When Tolstoy rejected the radical editing, Turgenev was hurt, telling a friend, “Someone else translated it, and probably the French won’t read it.” Turgenev considered himself an excellent editor. He was particularly proud of his editing work on the books by two great Russian poets who were not so lucky with publications in their lifetime: Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet.
At a dinner in his honor in 1856 when he came to visit St. Petersburg, after many toasts, Turgenev responded with an allegedly impromptu gem:
All this praise is undeserved
But one thing you must admit:
I forced Tyutchev to unzip
And I cleaned Fet’s pants.
This auto-epigram was greeted with howls of laughter from the bibulous writers, who understood the references: Turgenev had persuaded Tyutchev, engrossed in political and social intrigues, to agree to issue his verse, to which he was rather indifferent. It was edited by Turgenev and Nekrasov.
As for Fet, he had also given Turgenev a free hand, but when the book appeared in 1855, Fet found it “as cleaned up as it was disfigured.”12 Tyutchev too felt that Turgenev’s editing was heavy-handed, and that “many of his corrections ruined things.”13
Turgenev was friendly with everyone, but he also quarreled with everyone at some point—Nekrasov, Fet, Ivan Goncharov, author of
